PowerMac G4 no internet

[Nepnep]

Hello everyone, my PowerMac G4 quicksilver is coming along well. One of the things I’ve added to it is a modern-ish Edimax USB dongle with a Realtek chipset that’s known to work with Powermacs (V1 of the EW-7811UN). However, it doesn’t connect to the internet. The wireless network utility that comes with it since you obviously can’t control it with the airport utility has a signal strength indicator and it’s pegged at from 85%-100% at all times, yet nothing that involves connecting to the internet actually works. Has anyone else had this issue with third party wifi dongles? Is it because the setup is downstairs and since it doesn’t have an external antenna it’s actually not getting a good signal?

 

[lobust]

Can't help with your question directly, but my default solution for all my vintage machines is one of the very cheap wifi bridges linked below connected via ethernet to the computer in question.

Connect it via ethernet, log in to it's admin interface, put it in Repeater mode and connect it to your wireless network. After it restarts it is basically a dumb wireless ethernet port with all DHCP assignment / routing handled by whatever is upstream of your wifi network. You can even connect a switch to it and connect as many machines as you want. You can't turn off the wifi repeater, but you can hide the SSID so it doesn't clutter up your wifi list.

It started as a project to wirelessly network cnc machines across a large open workshop (commercial solutions for this are ridiculously expensive) and it worked fine, but I soon found a better purpose for them

I have used this setup on everything from my Quadra 700 to my W10 gaming PC, and it always works perfectly with no hassle. It even worked with my G4 Cube, when the Cube for some reason locked up when connected directly by ethernet to my router.

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[volvo242gt]

On my B&W G3, I used a Linksys wireless-G PCI card. Worked great. Had no problems connecting to an eero mesh wi-fi router that we have as our backup wirelss network. Would've connected it to our main network, but didn't want to throttle other devices down to wireless-G from AC or N.

 

[jeremywork]

If you're in OS X, the interface also needs to be added in the Network preference pane before the system can access it (slightly different process depending on the osx version, but the interface is usually identifiable as some sort of wireless adapter or secondary ethernet interface in the dropdown list of interfaces you can add.) Once it's added and the Apply button is pressed, as long as you're seeing good signal strength in the wireless utility you should be able to obtain (or set) an IP address.

 

[Cory5412]

Are you on OS 9 or OS X?

There's different procedures for each, and, the compatibility with different wireless networks is different for each, with OS X 10.4 supporting WPA 2 wireless networks and OS 9 only supporting WEP and unencrypted networks.

The solution lobust mentioned is likely the best overall option, especially as volvo242gt said in some wireless networking configs using devices too far out of date may slow down performance for newer devices. Lots of modern mesh systems let you hang ethernet-based devices off of ethernet ports on each node, and some modern routers simply have a client mode where they join the network as a client and bridge or NAT to clients on their own ethernet ports.